Word: bhalkhel
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...following night, RK3 hiked deeper into the mountains. On the bare hillsides, the troopers saw "countless tracks, fortifications and bunkers along the ridge lines," the patrol leader later wrote in his report. When they reached their objective, a ridge overlooking the valley and the village of Bhalkhel, they discovered a gun emplacement and a Russian-built heavy machine gun with a range of more than 3,500m. The patrol leader - according to his own report - ordered his men to set up an observation post about 40 m from the gun. Because there were no rocks or shrubs big enough...
...Australians withdrew in the darkness, still unaware that the men they'd been fighting were not al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters but residents of Bhalkhel village. During the gun battle, they'd killed at least two villagers. But worse was to come. Two kilometers away, on a ridge on the other side of the valley, about 40 tribesmen from Sabari village were taking cover for the night in a series of bunkers hidden among wild olives and holly trees. They were guarding their homes, as they did every night, from their rivals in Bhalkhel, with whom they had been feuding...
...When they heard gunfire coming from the Bhalkhel positions, "We thought the Bhalkhel were attacking us, so we opened fire too," says one of the men, Abdul Hassan. Some of the bullets and RPGs targeted the SAS rescue convoy, which was making its way through the valley without lights. By now, however, the odds had changed. A U.S. forward air controller traveling with the Australians summoned the AC-130, call sign reaper, whose laser-guided bombs smashed into the Sabari bunkers...
...Hassan was peppered with shrapnel and hurled into the air by an explosion. "I was sure I was fighting the Bhalkhel, so the last thing I expected was for bombs to fall from the sky," he says. When he regained consciousness, his best friend Alif Shah was lying beside him. "A fire was burning inside his chest," Hassan recalls. "He was dead." The tribesmen on the ridge were too dazed and panicked to count the bombs, but Kamil Shah, who watched in horror from nearby Zambar village, says "80 to 100 bombs fell that night." His brother...
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